How crass is too crass?

I’m no prude. Granted, there are probably Mennonite housewives who are having a wilder time than me right now, but as a rule I’m quite relaxed when it comes to what more delicate types might describe as “colourful” language. It takes a lot to offend me. Hell, I’ve written three books in which I record South Africa’s favourite rude words and miscellaneous insults and I’m fond of using very bad words when other motorists don’t indicate to turn left at traffic circles. My own standards of what one might call linguistic decorum are hardly lofty.

So why do I find myself wincing at some of the things I read on Twitter?

Right from the time I first registered two years ago, I noticed that the rules on Twitter were different. Recently I completed a piece I’d pitched to a weekly newspaper and I gave the issue some thought again. The article was all about one of my perennially favourite subjects, the F-word, and how it became so much more publicly acceptable after the dismantling of apartheid. The decline and fall of Christian Nationalism loosened the collective stays of society, so that sex and bad language emerged blinking into the bright light of a new culture of permissiveness.

Twitter is taking this a step further, pushing the boundaries of the public acceptability of words normally expressed with a diffident combination of letters and asterisks, the nipple caps of the lexical world. A dipstick into the zeitgeist, a source of useful links, a way to offer opinions on Cristiano Ronaldo’s hair, Twitter is also, from time to time, a moderately bacchanalian orgy of offensive epithets. They’re almost all here. Not the K-word (I seldom if ever see that one, thank heaven for small mercies), but the F-word is flung about with gay abandon. Everything’s fucking this or fucking that. Or, if you want to save on characters, WTF. (#Poes was a trending topic in Johannesburg last week.)

Fair enough; fuck lost most of its shock value somewhere around 1995, possibly earlier. But it’s not just the four letter words. It’s also the figures of speech. By way of example, the one that stands out for me is the revelation that a new vodka chocolate drink was so delicious it made someone I follow — a high-flying professional, not the long-lost son of Homer Simpson and Yo-landi Vi$$er — want to “jizz in his pants”. Food and semen references, yay! But you expect a certain let’s-shock-them bravado from men, especially when they’ve been drinking. What surprises me are the women.

Far be it from me to suggest that we see more ladylike behaviour online — that would be rank hypocrisy — but jeez, some of these chicks are hardcore. This evening, the Cosmopolitan Hottest Barman was the biggest event in the immediate Twitterverse. I saw several tweets from women about how the barmen were so hot, she was “slipping off her seat”. (A figure of speech of which I was blissfully unaware until very recently, dewy-eyed innocent that I am.) There were so many nudge-nudge wink-wink puns on the word “cocktail” I lost count, and there was a distinct note of Essex bachelorette in the air.

What I find fascinating is how many women will tweet using a word long considered the single most offensive in the English language, the final linguistic frontier: the one that begins with C. There are definite signs that it is becoming more mainstream and, evidently, more acceptable. I see it in my timeline all the time, and that’s not counting one of the profiles I follow, which goes by the memorable moniker of @cuntoftheday. Germaine Greer’s famous assertion that this is one of the few remaining words in the English language with the genuine power to shock may not hold true for much longer.

Many of the women who tweet the C-word are in the media, so they have plenty of followers as well as public images to maintain. That’s partly why I find the free-for-all so odd — if you’ve got a personal brand to nurture, and everybody’s talking personal branding these days, you’ll be aware of the risks of being too casual. In a public forum, you have to exercise a certain amount of caution; you’re not skinnering over a glass of wine at book club after all. (For that reason I censor myself: I’ll use words like kak and crap in my tweets, but nothing stronger.) That’s what’s so compellingly strange about Twitter: it’s public, and people use it as a platform to perform for an audience, but it’s treated as though it’s personal and private. Sooner or later this is going to get somebody somewhere into trouble, as it already has.

Then again, maybe that’s just me. Maybe I’m more delicate than I realised. Still, when words are written out they carry a heft and a permanence that can never be conveyed by a rude word uttered in passing. Words in idle chitchat don’t get cached; tweets do.

Before anyone gets too excited, I’m not suggesting that anyone censor themselves. Not at all — I’m far too much of a wuss to stand here and say: thou shalt be ashamed of thyself for writing in so vulgar a fashion. After all, if I’m offended by a tweet, I am free to stop following whoever was responsible for it. (I don’t unfollow people because I want to see what everybody has to say, even if I don’t like it.) But I’d like to pose the question anyway: just how crass is too crass? I’d be interested to know what you think.

Just saying. Or, as they write on Twitter, #justsaying.